At at party this weekend, I met Cisco engineer Landon Curt Noll. He had a rack of three digital SLRs on a telescope mount, and was getting ready to ship his gear to China in order to observe the upcoming solar eclipse.
Noll’s an amateur astronomer, and he’s searching for Vulcanoid asteroids, which, if they exist, would orbit near the plane of the ecliptic within the orbit of Mercury.
Since they are close to the Sun, finding them remains a challenge. That’s why Noll’s going to a Chinese desert, near the Mongolian border, with three customized digital SLRs (he’s on good terms with Canon’s engineers) that will image the swath of the ecliptic close to the Sun but out of the corona during totality.
Big telescopes aren’t lucky enough to sit under the path of an eclipse’s totality, and space based observatories such as the Hubble can’t look near the sun, or are designed to look at the Sun (and aren’t sensitive enough to look for small rocks, 83 trillion times dimmer than the sun.) So this is a hunt where amateur astronomers, equipped with high tech cameras and mounts, will make the big discoveries.
Noll leaves for China next week, and he’ll give several talks on his work on the way to setting up for the observations during the eclipse.
If Wall-E had stuck to what it started out as, an elegy in a world without humans, it would had been incredible.
Pixar could had made a post-human world Disney friendly, by adapting Howard Waldrop’s Heirs of the Perisphere.
Though I loved the starliner Axiom. The designers were channeling the space art of Robert McCall that I grew up on when they came up with it
To deal with the increasing number of compromised blogs, WordPress 2.6 will turn off XML-RPC and AtomPUB interfaces by default.
MarsEdit developer Daniel Jalkut points out that the WordPress developers are ignoring the root cause:
If your web service only provides one, first-class API through which all access flows, then you’ve only got one point to secure, you’re likely to have feature parity across interfaces, and the risk of marginalizing one interface is dramatically decreased.
While SproutCore uses Ruby to generate static HTML and JavaScript files, you are not tied to Ruby or Rails in production.
SproutCore runs in the browser, your production system can use whatever backend you want, as long as it sends JSON to the browser.
When I was using an early version of SproutCore to build .Mac Web Gallery last year, the backing system was a WebDAV server that produced JSON when asked. I’m pretty sure that WebObjects is the backend sending JSON to the calendar and address book applications demoed at last week’s WWDC.
The nice thing about the separation of browser logic from the backend is that you can build some static JSON fixtures you can serve from your local web server while you’re developing your application.
ETA: Charles Jolley reminds me that you can consume XML as well as JSON, but JSON remains faster.
I mean, XML is better if you have more text and fewer tags. And JSON is better if you have more tags and less text. Argh! I mean, come on, it’s that easy. But you know, there’s a big debate about it. [Steve Yegge, via Simon Wilison]
I’ve been asking that question in interviews, and I don’t think there’s still a big debate about when to use XML and when to use JSON. It’s now settled.
And Yegge’s answer is not quite right. I think the difference is between structural markup and key/value pairs.
However, there are also cases when you should prefer text/plain over JSON. A hint: every object in a Second Life sim might have an HTTP engine running in it.
After last night’s apocalyptic episode of BSG, and starting the grim novel Daughters of the North, discovering a coat of ash on my car from yesterday’s fires was creepy.
Smoke from the forest fires around Santa Cruz Mountains King City to the South, and a burning foam factory in Fremont to the East have made for dramatic skies this evening.
A mention of Brian Eno results in three out of five people in the car breaking out in a chorus of Backwater.
My friend John worked on the Large Area Telescope, part of the GLAST spacecraft which rode into orbit on a Delta rocket earlier today. The LAT will look at a large swath of space, detecting gamma ray bursts from exploding stars and other cataclysms. And yes, people use wikis for these projects.
Paulina Borsook comments on the hipster-contrarian vibe of Wired magazine’s 15th anniversary issue. Borsook wrote a parody of Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarian culture for Suck, back in the day, which remains one of my favorites.
Taken at Purgatorio, while wearing the Steam Sparrow Robot avatar by mochi Rokocoko.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught an image of the Mars Phoenix Lander after it had deployed its parachute just before its landing on the plains of the Martian Arctic.
Alan Bostick: I want to see a new MMORPG, Kingdom of Mary Sue.
On Twitter, Brad Graham noted that this is the anniversary of Peter Merholz referring to weblogs as “wee-blogs,” and destroying life as we know it.
